Gears of War 4’s PC Exclusive Features Detailed

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Microsoft have been promising for years that they’re going to stop treating PC like their least favourite cousin and they seem to be following through more than usual of late. They announced at E3 that Gears of War 4 is coming to Windows 10 and now its developers have been talking about its PC-specific features, such as an unlocked framerate and remappable controls.

“Our focus on PC is to deliver a highly optimised, customisable experience first and foremost,” The Coalition’s Mike Rayner told Eurogamer. Gears of War 4 will have an unlocked framerate now that Universal Windows Platform games have the option to turn off v-sync.

The game is also getting improved textures on PC, with some texture groups reaching up to 4K resolution. PC players will have access to a benchmark mode, to work out how to make it look its best on your machine. The keyboard and mouse controls are also entirely remappable, including the controls for cover and running, which share the same button on the Xbox controller.

The Coalition will implement many more video settings, too, with clearer signposts to explain how each setting changes performance. Rayner, the game’s technical director, explained:

“Today we sit at 28 different settings and we’re thinking of ways to add more for people to really have full control. Along with more settings, we’re putting extra time into making it clear what impact a setting will have on GPU/CPU/VRAM so there is a clear correlation between a setting change and its performance impact.”

The PC release is also apparently benefiting from work done to make the game run smoothly on XBox One, including offering “dynamic resolution scaling” which will change the resolution of the game on the fly in order to make sure your framerate doesn’t dip below 30fps in singleplayer and 60fps in multiplayer.

Gears of War 4 launches on October 11. It will be one of the first Xbox Play Anywhere titles, through which you can buy a digital copy of the game on PC or Xbox One and access it across both.

20 Comments

Hey RPS, could you look into and perhaps write a report on the state and future of high dynamic range content on PC? Nvidia had a technical article awhile back about how Rise of the Tomb Raider is being updated to support HDR, but other than that I have heard absolutely nothing on the subject.

Gears 4 is going to be one of the first games to offer HDR on consoles via the Xbox One S refresh coming out next month, so it’s concerning that it hasn’t been mentioned as a feature for the PC version of the game. As an adult who has just purchased his first proper grown-up television set, I’d like to know: Are we going to be left behind, or is every developer in the biz just working on this super quietly for some reason?

Yup, all Microsoft is doing by making their games W10 exclusive is encouraging people to play something else. At this point I’m more or less boycotting their new products out of spite.

Capitalism giveth and capitalism taketh away, Mr. Gates, and not all prices are counted solely in terms of dollars. The cost of Microsoft products is becoming unacceptably high in more ways than one. At this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised if the company goes the way of Yahoo within the next ten years.

You cannot even get a refund on that damn Windows Store. Also, by design, these windows apps always run in borderless fullscreen mode, so you cannot get the best performance. You also cannot use SLI and vsync is always on. You cannot mod the game or use a Steam controller with it.

Said updates are coming painfully slowly, and realistically put off any potential purchaser from wanting to go near the Windows store because well, it’s the Windows store. It’s terrible, and the whole Windows app experience is terrible with it. Even my mother who is moderately “okay” with Windows 10 only touches it for free games, she’s decided she won’t -buy- anything on it.

If Windows wanted to show PC gaming as a market it was in any way serious, it would work with the big players to try and improve DirectX interoperability and to make the Windows Store platform more open in general and not try and create an Apple “Walled Garden” from which it can ape Apple’s cut of the profit whenever people release apps over it.

Microsoft is once again trying to be the cool dad at the party, and once again, it’s -doing it wrong-. You can’t wall off a system which you’ve been deliberately benefiting from having a very open ecosystem and one where you have zero vertical integration. Doing so will only result in the eventual situation where people will finally get off their ass and actually find a way to make Linux palatable for desktop usage for the unwashed masses.

[quote]offering “dynamic resolution scaling” which will change the resolution of the game on the fly in order to make sure your framerate doesn’t dip below 30fps in singleplayer and 60fps in multiplayer[/quote]
Ahhh, yes, and that wont intrude at all with having the frame cap unlocked, will it?
It is a ‘feature’ of my TV (4k) that I wish I could turn off. It introduces lag in movies and television, so it will also do the same to a video game, where you DONT want input lag, and where control is the key component of playing.
Sigh.
I bet they still have keys that are ‘locked’ and cant be rebound at all, OR they wont do the Numpad + Delete/Insert/End/Home/Enter correctly (being able to bind numpad and those other keys seperately).
And, no mention of FOV, or Blur, or DOF, or anything else like that ?
We will see though.
If they do this stuff right, it might be my first GOW game (as it does look intersersting to me, and if co-op, even better).